Predicting Personality

Chapter FourHOW TO UNDERSTAND ANYONE'S PERSONALITY

Where was the last new place you traveled to?

For me, it was Italy. I recently took a road trip from Sicily to Rome on an Ancestry.com-fueled adventure to discover my family roots.

While you cannot have a much more Italian last name than “D'Agostino,” I speak almost zero Italian, had never been to the country, and did not know much more about my heritage than the typical slightly-above-casual Godfather fan. Sure, I had access to plenty of information. Wikipedia could tell me about the Romans. TripAdvisor could tell me where to find Pompeii. Yelp could show me a thousand gelato shops in Palermo.

However, knowing some facts about a place is not the same as knowing the place.

After a year of reading articles about Roman history, I still would not be able to tell you what it feels like to stand in the middle of the Colosseum and imagine life as a gladiator. TripAdvisor did not tell me what it feels like to watch the sun set on Mount Vesuvius. Yelp, unfortunately, could not tell me what streetside gelato tastes like on a humid Sicilian evening. To get all of that, to know the place, I needed to visit.

People are similar. With as little as a social profile, I can learn lots of things about you without ever meeting you. I can probably find out where you have worked, where you went to school, who your friends are, and how you decided to dress up your dog for Halloween. In most cases, I can even get some more qualitative insights, like ...